Music News

LINKIN PARK, 30 SECONDS TO MARS KICK OFF 'CARNIVORES TOUR'

Linkin Park and 30 Seconds To Mars kick off their co-headlining North American trek, dubbed the Carnivores Tour, on Friday (August 8th) in West Palm Beach, Florida. On a conference call this week to talk about the tour, Linkin Park singer Mike Shinoda was asked about recreating the sound of the band's last few and heavily layered studio albums live: "Although there is the technology in the setup of what we've got going on onstage -- and I feel like it's very high-tech for a music set-up -- we also feel like we have a great deal of responsibility to be a live band. So, you know, whereas we have the opportunity to put certain things in the computer or on a sampler and whatever, we're very careful about what we do put in the computer because we want to be playing everything, we want the crowd to see us performing the song."

Shinoda told us earlier in the year that the concept behind the Carnivores Tour was "that visceral, kind of animal instinct that I think people hear in a lot of our music. It's aggressive, it's big and that's the kind of show we want to bring to the fans."

Linkin Park is touring in support of its latest set,The Hunting Party, which debuted at Number Three on the Billboard 200 album chart in June, selling 110,000 copies in its first week of release.

The disc was the first Linkin Park album to miss a Number One debut since the band's first album, Hybrid Theory, which peaked at Number Two in 2002.

AFI is also joining Linkin Park and 30 Seconds To Mars on the tour as special guests. Dates are booked through late September.